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The first moments after the boy’s death pass for him in a confused and weighty blur.
These houses are crammed together, all stuck in a line, with no garages or big front yards and only the narrowest of alleys between every fourth or fifth house. Nothing like his own street back home. In fact, this doesn’t look like an American street at all. It looks almost – It looks almost English.
His eyes adjust to the light more, the room becoming more of itself, taking shape, revealing details – Revealing the horse screaming from above the mantelpiece. A crazed eye, a tongue like a spike, trapped inside a burning world, looking at him from behind a picture frame. Looking right at him.
“Parked outside Callen Fletcher’s house waiting for his parents to go to bed so we can steal his Baby Jesus. You sure know how to treat a girl, Harold.”
He’s wearing clean clothes and new shoes and for the first time since he died, he feels almost human.
Gudmund shook his head. “Nah, Monica and I are like brother and sister.” “You flirt that much with your sister?
The torch has caught the stairs. It’s the first time he’s properly looked at them, the first time a proper light has been on them, and he sees – Footprints. In the dust coming down the stairs. He’s not alone. There’s somebody else here.
“Surgery,” his father said. “And cognitive therapy. Almost every day.” Seth looked back up. “I thought you said we couldn’t afford that.” “We can’t. Insurance only covers so much. Your mum’s going to have to go back to work to help with the costs and it’s going to eat badly into our savings. We’ve got rough times ahead, Seth.”
He looks at the cover again. A satyr playing pan pipes, far more innocent-looking than what it got up to in the story.
A world made of words, Seth thinks, where you live for a while.
“There’s more than this, Sethy,” Gudmund said. “This sucks beyond belief, but there’s more. We just have to get there.”
“And then we, uh,” Regine says, and she actually seems to blush, “we saw you showering. In the rain. Out in front of your house.” Tomasz grins even wider. “You were pulling on your willy!”
A short, happy Polish kid and a big, suspicious black girl. Did he create them? Because they’re just about the last and weirdest thing he’d pick to create.
“This is a very terrible painting,” he says, staring up at the panicked horse above the mantel.
“I was not in Poland,” Tomasz says, irate. “How many times I have to say? Mother came over for work. And Poland is online quite fine, thank you very much.
“People see stories everywhere,” Regine says. “That’s what my father used to say. We take random events and we put them together in a pattern so we can comfort ourselves with a story, no matter how much it obviously isn’t true.” She glances back at Seth. “We have to lie to ourselves to live. Otherwise, we’d go crazy.”
“What I do know is that if you give a human being a chance to be stupid and violent, then they’re going to take it, every time. No matter where they are.”
I say, Who cares what Mr. Seth wants, Mr. Seth does not know proper danger he is in. I say we take shotgun and we go.”
“Oh, poor little Seth, with his poor little parents who didn’t love him. You said we all want there to be more than this! Well, there’s always more than this. There’s always something you don’t know. Maybe your parents didn’t love you enough, and that sucks, yes, it does, but maybe it wasn’t because you were bad. Maybe it was just because the worst thing in the world had happened to them and they weren’t able to deal with it.”
“When do you think we’re going to find anything here that makes good sense?” “I do not know, Mr. Seth. I am hopeful for soon.”
“Don’t you think after dying a hundred times in a row I deserve one measly cigarette?”
I mean, there’s got to be glitches all the time, people remembering stuff they shouldn’t –”
“Oh, we will do our best, Mr. Seth, but it may not be good enough.” “What happened to Tomasz saves the world again?” Tomasz shrugs. “I am bound to muck it up one of these times.”
“Tuna-noodle casserole?” Tomasz says, sitting next to Owen. “I have not heard of this.”
“Are you serious? Real life is only ever just real life. Messy. What it means depends on how you look at it. The only thing you’ve got to do is find a way to live there.”
“Life does not have to go how you think it will,” Tomasz says. “Not even when you are very sure what is going to happen.”
He doesn’t know where he’ll wake up. Here. Or there. Or some third place, even more unexpected than this one. Because who can say in the end that any one of these places is more real than any other?
